Archive: 20 September – 26 September 2010

A tweet pinged in yesterday: literary agent Jonny Geller's suggestions for "freshers' week novels". He had the goodies in his list: surely any undergraduate ought make immediate haste to read the marvellous Lucky Jim, in which Kingsley Amis provides the most immortal description of a hangover ("…His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.") Then there is David Nicholls' story of student love and University Challenge, Starter for Ten; Bradbury's classic campus novel The History Man; and Donna Tartt's hilarious and gripping The Secret History, a story of students studying Greek in a liberal arts college in the US and getting a little bit too interested in Euripides' Bacchae. Continue reading...

Here's some food for thought: an open letter to Jeremy Hunt from Clive Gillinson, who was the respected, indeed visionary managing director of the London Symphony Orchestra before departing five years ago to take up one of the most important cultural roles in New York, director of Carnegie Hall.

It's interesting because you could never have exactly accused Gillinson of being left-wing, and he was something of a critic of Arts Council England – to that extent, he ought to be broadly on the same page as Hunt. Interesting that he mentions tax incentives to giving - such measures have been long discussed in this country but show as little sign of being enacted under the coaltion as Labour.

Mark Wallinger's Reckless shows a copy of Turner's masterpiece The Fighting Temeraire slashed, with a caption: 'If 25% were slashed from arts funding the loss would be immeasurable.' Photograph: Mark Wallinger

Rumours are building that the arts budget could be in for a dreadful 40% cut

It's not every day that someone invites you to clamber inside his or her organ, and yet this was the unexpectedly intriguing start to my Monday morning. I was at the Southbank Centre in London, attending the launch of a fundraising campaign to restore the Royal Festival Hall's organ to its former glory. Only a third of it is in action at the moment; the rest has been in bits in a Durham warehouse since before the hall was reopened in 2007 after its refurbishment. The campaign has £1.35m to raise, which it hopes to do so over the next three years. The focus of the campaign is to invite music lovers to sponsor an organ pipe, from the petite 1ft ones (£30) to the vast 32ft numbers (£10,000). (I wrote a piece about all this for our news pages.)

Anyway, the most exciting part of the morning (aside from hearing what there is of the organ played by its curator William McVicker) was being invited to step inside the instrument itself, an offer one could barely refuse even though it involved clambering, unsuitably shod, up two steep ladders with my notebook in my teeth and then being subjected to a precipitous view from the top of the organ way down to the stage (all this and one was urged by the delightful Andrew Scott, who works as the organ tuner for a number of London's most famous organs, not to touch any of the pipes or even to knock them with a jacket, since they can go out of tune so easily). Continue reading...